From soft power to soft borders: Crisis management and migration flows in Turkey Kerem Öktem

Introduction

This paper seeks to outline how Turkey’s foreign policy actors in the early 2000s have developed soft power capabilities, and how these have failed in the wake of the Syrian Crisis. Building on the core arguments presented in the collection Another Empire? A decade of Turkey’s foreign policy under the Justice and Development Party (Istanbul, Bilgi University Press, 2012), it suggests that the liberal visa regimes, which the Turkish government introduced with its non-Schengen neighbours in the region and beyond have added to the multiple challenges, which the political crises and wars in its eastern neighbourhood pose for Turkey’s internal stability.